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Looks pretty good. I like that it is certified for 50GB/day - much higher than the original which makes me think the nand is better. Price will need to get down to 120 or so though, that 1GB/$1 is critical. Reply

OCZ indeed have managed fooling people that these drives are much better than the old ones.Any drive with 3k P/E writes MLC NAND from 128 GB and up, write endurance wise should be able to support at the very least 50 GB of writes per day for 5 years, even taking into account a rather high write amplification of 4.5-5.

It's all mostly about how much manufacturers are willing to risk cannibalizing their enterprise lineup. I don't think OCZ has much left to lose at this point.Reply

Sadly, this was the experience of a friend who made the mistake of buying an OCZ drive. It failed, so he RMA'd it. The replacement failed. So he RMA'd that. THAT replacement failed... Eventually he gave up and bought an Intel drive, which... didn't fail.Reply

Much cheaper EVO looks like the bang for the buck winner still. Every six months there is something significantly better for less cost anyway. Why pay premium prices for such a short amount of time at the 'top'? Buy the best 'bang for the buck' products as much as possible.Reply

Buying OCZ SSD is suicide. Even with impressive hardware it's just not worth the problems. I can tell as the user of quite a premium drive from them: Revodrive 3. No TRIM support, drivers only for Win7 (and not even planned for anything else), horrible boot times (due to its bios insisting on showing some useless information, you can even press Space to reduce this time that proves that it would be easy to improve the situation if the company was willing to improve things as users asked).Reply

I really don't see how comparing a SSD purchase to suicide is relevant. Any component can fail at any time - it is not the end of life having a graphics card fizzle or SSD disappear. If anyone remembers when Anandtech reviewed the 840 Pro the sample died and then when they tested the replacement it died. It happens. http://www.anandtech.com/show/6328/samsung-ssd-840... I still buy and will buy Samsung, I have bought and will buy from OCZ. Reply

As long as we're playing the anecdotal game, I bought a Vertex 2 and it failed, but allowed me to recover all the data from it. It was a little weird, but whatever. Reinstalled to it and it worked fine. Then I switched to a Vertex 4 and it has treated me well. So ... Reply

I just don't get why people would consider an OCZ drive over the competition. It'd be like buying a Quantum Bigfoot, IBM Deskstar 75GXP or Conner S35-series drive, all of which either had storage, performance or price crowns of their time, but all well-known for their poor reliability, including their successors. All of these companies failed.

Quantum was purchased by Maxtor who discontinued the Bigfoot, IBM was purchased by Hitachi (who struggled to get those GMR heads to work beyond the 60GXP) and Conner went bankrupt and the assets were ironically purchased by Quantum who liquidated everything but their tape-backup business.Reply

The difference is that the Samsung samples were promptly fixed with a firmware update before it was released to retail. I'd have no faith in OCZ fixing such firmware issues, and the Samsung 840 Pro has gone on to be a solid dependable drive.

These failures are almost always firmware bugs, I think SSD generally rarely physically fail (though I have no numbers to back that up) and OCZ don't have a stellar reputation in that department.

Not that OCZ will be around to honour the 5 year warranty anyway....Reply

Yes I agree. Sandisk had been around 25 years. Ocz will be lucky to be around for another three months, thier cash burn is ridiculous and they are running on fumes provided by loan sharks....which is why they are a penny stock, yet no one buys them. The reason they haven't been bought is that the barefoot is just a rebadged marvell controller.they have no ip.Reply

The 'proof' is common sense. First, they have lied in the past, saying that the first Barefoots were from them, until a document was leaked, remember that?Second, every single company producing a good controller that is not owned by a fab or other large enterprise company has been bought in the last few years. The exception is OCZ. If they actually had a controller, someone else would have bought them. Doesn't it strike you as funny that this Barefoot also has the same "Aragon Co-Processor" as the controller that they admitted they were lying about, which was Marvel? If they lied once, what makes you think they wouldn't lie again? Wasnt it Anand that broke that story in the first place? The only difference is the leaker was found and fired. Reply

OCZ stock is worth 45cents a share, 3x lower value this week alone. By all observers from numerous sources in the market ocz is in a state of collapse. Readers should be warned, they will not be there to honor that rma. Reply

The irony of a dead OCZ review sample. Screw this company. I jsut had my 2nd to last OCZ drive die on me this week. It started with a failure to update java which lead to a failure of the windows installer. Finally it just died and the BIOS wouldnt even see the drive anymore. I have one more OCZ drive left, and I am sure it will die soon. Yes, every single OCZ drive that I have even bought has died.Reply

That is really sad and unfortunate, I have an Agility3 60GB which I bought June 2011 (IIRC), still working perfectly in a friend's PC, I also have two Vertex4 128GB drives (seperate computers), as well as having sold two Vertex4 64GB drives to two other friends - they all working fine... Guess it really is just a big lottery maybe...Reply

In my experience this depends entirely on which line you are buying. I have and use four or five Vertex and Agility series drives and I've sold dozens of others. I have yet to see a single one of them fail.

By contrast, I bought and sold a handful of lower end OCZ drives, including the Petrol, Solid and Fuel, and the majority of these died in short time. I even had a RMA replacement die after about a month of light use. The last Petrol to fail was replaced by an Agility because thankfully OCZ had stopped shipping the Petrol.

So yeah, I stick to their top shelf SSDs and happily pocket the savings over the lower performing and more expensive Intel drives.Reply

Actually, I've already tested the Intel SSD 530 and am just waiting for Intel to confirm a few things so I can push the review live. I didn't want to include the results here as it kind of ruins the idea of a review if all the scores have been published beforehand. But you should expect the review to surface early next week :)Reply

OCZ's been taking a beating in profits. If you look at the sheer number of refurb deals on OCZ drives as of late, it looks like they're dumping their inventory at reduced prices with virtually no warranties, hoping to clear out warehouses. They're trying to make a quick buck in a hurry because their stock is taking a beating after their profits didn't line up.

I'd say this might be one of the last times you read an OCZ SSD review.Reply

My only truly horrid SSD experience has been with an Agility 4. Data corruption, randomly not even appearing in the BIOS (on common Intel SATA controllers), etc. RMA'd it once. The replacement did the same thing. RMA'd that one too. The third one is just as bad, and it's sitting in a desk drawer until I get around to sending it back yet again. That's with the latest firmware. Completely anecdotal of course, but 3 bad drives in a row from OCZ when I've never had similar issues with a larger set of drives from Crucial, Plextor, and Kingston.Reply

I still have a 60GB Agility 2 running fine, although I've been using it as a giant external USB memory stick for the last year (using a USB to SATA adapter that came with a Samsung SSD). It's work amazing as a memory stick, copying files at about 30mb/sec on USB 2.Reply

I've been using a 128 GB Vertex 3 since they launched it back in 2011. It had the blue screen issue but that got fixed after a firmware update. It's been working great ever since. Too bad for OCZ, looks like they're beyond hope at this point. Based on the comments their reputation has been soiled, and they'd need a miracle to keep going.Reply

Random writes can take advantage of write combining (i.e. small IOs are combined to make look like one big IO), which in turn will allow higher level of parallelism as the operation can be spread to a number of die.

With random reads that is not possible because when the host sends a read IO request, the controller can't wait to combine it with more reads because that would add unnecessary latency (which means whatever you're doing will slow down because the OS is waiting for your SSD). Low queue depth random reads cannot take much advantage of parallelism because at QD=3, the controller can only read from three dies simultaneously (decrease QD to 1 and it can only read from one die).Reply

I have 2 ssd's, both would be considered the cheaper "consumer" quality, and usage would be considered very light. Would spending extra on an enterprise level ssd with higher warranty get me a drive that lasts a good bit longer?Reply

With very light usage, I don't think there is any reason to pay extra for an enthusiast class SSD, let alone enterprise-grade. Even the basic consumer SSDs (like Samsung SSD 840 EVO for instance) should outlive the other components in your system.Reply

OCZ as a company has, time and again, proven their complete contempt for their customer base. Release something in a late alpha, buggy state, berate their customers for six months while they dutifully jump through all the hoops trying to fix it, then many months down the road release a bios that makes it marginally useful.

Not going to be an abused, unpaid beta tester for this company. Never again. Will lift a glass to toast when their poor products and crappy support ultimately send them the way of the dodo.Reply

I am surprised by all of the negative feedback here, they must all be in their own worlds. Everyone can only base their opinion on their own experiences, but individuals lack the statistical quantity to make an educated determination. I have been using OCZ drives for three years now. The cause of failure of the only one's that have failed have been isolated, and corrected. A "corner issue" where a power event causes the corruption of the firmware rendering the drive inert, corrected in the latest firmware.

1. REVO is "bleeding edge" hardware, expect to bleed2. Agility is cheap crap, throw it away3. Vertex and Vector lines have been stable

It is interesting how many complain, yet do not provide specifics. Which model drive? What motherboard? What firmware version? I do not care for the opinions of strangers, you need to back it up with details. People get frustrated by inconvenience, and often prefer to complain and replace rather than correct the problem. As I said, I use OCZ on most of my computers, but I install Intel and Plextor for builds I sell. Reliability and toolbox are more practical for most users, and Intel is among, if not the top, of the most reliable drives.Reply

Much of the hate has to do with how consumers were treated during the support process. I can only imagine if a painless fast exchange for failed drives was the status quo we wouldn't have the vitriol posted here. OCZ failed at least twice, with hardware and then poor support. Reply

The review states that the Vector 150 is better than the Corsair Neutron in terms of consistency, but the graphs indicate otherwise. At around the 100 second mark, the Vector 150 drops to around 3500 IOPS for one second, whereas the Neutron is always above 6000 IOPS. So it seems there is a mistake somewhere.Reply